A documentary short featuring women changemakers working to create a more just world. In the film, contemporary leaders in the U.S. West reflect on the early legacy of visible women in the region, as well as the challenges they and their peers face today, and their hopes for the future.
SYNOPSIS
Throughout history, women changemakers have often been labeled “dangerous” and “subversive,” yet their vision has proved prophetic. Most Dangerous Women features the often untold and little-known stories and voices of “dangerous women” fighting for equality, social justice, and peace in their communities and on a global stage. It invites viewers to discover and document women in their own families, communities, and regions working to create a more equitable, socially just, and peaceful world.
Women who were once labeled “dangerous” often shine heroic today. In the 1920s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover characterized Jane Addams as "the most dangerous woman in America." Dangerous because of her pacifism, her challenges to the status quo, her work with immigrants and the poor. Across generations, women such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Jeannette Rankin, Coretta Scott King, Shirley Chisholm, and thousands of less well-known women raised their voices and worked to create a more just and equitable world. Those who dared to enter the public sphere were mocked, abused, and imprisoned. In many circumstances, powerful women still are. Most Dangerous Women presents the stories of women of the past along with compelling narrations from contemporary dangerous women who tell of their own journeys and their deepest desires for future generations.
Most Dangerous Women was inspired by a life changing readers’ theater play of the same name, which focuses on more than 100 years of women’s peace activism. When working with this play over the decades it has been performed, we discovered that actors and audience members always asked the same questions: “Why don’t I know about these women? Why weren’t their stories taught to me or shared?” Actors reported being transformed as they embodied the historic characters. We similarly hoped to encourage viewers to find solidarity and inspiration in the women whose stories we presented, opening an intergenerational dialogue that links, past, present, and future.
The pilot episode focuses on the American West, because in 1869 Wyoming became the first government in the world to recognize women’s right to vote and to hold public office. Women of Wyoming Territory boldly grasped this opportunity, winning elections as justices of the peace, legislators, and other offices. When Wyoming became a state in 1890, women’s rights were maintained, and Wyoming became known as the Equality State. Other Western territories and states followed in recognizing women’s right to vote and hold public office. Women’s newly won visibility established them as effective leaders and role models, shaping the West and concurrently fueling the quest for national women’s suffrage, which came fifty years after Wyoming’s.
This episode features interviews with Wyoming women legislators at the February 2020 legislative session in Cheyenne, including Andi Clifford, a member of the Wind River Arapaho who represented Wyoming’s District 33. It also features faculty and students from the University of Wyoming, and academic and student leaders at the 2019 National Women’s Studies Annual Conference (NWSA) in San Francisco. “This Is Our Time,” the theme of the film, is taken from the interview in the film with singer and activist Holly Near, who comes from California, and whose music is also featured. All of these women reflect on dangerous women in their own lives, the complexities of women’s activism, historic and contemporary initiatives and coalitions, and their hopes for the future.
We intended to do follow-up interviews, but the pandemic made this impossible. We then realized we had in hand the elements of a film that could serve as a realistic model for new storytellers to learn to locate, research, reclaim, authentically document, and share the stories they discover, with minimal production elements and at a relatively low cost. We finished the film in 2022 and created a toolkit with additional resources, discussion questions, and guidance for discovering and documenting past, present, and future dangerous women in every community. We began to show it to community groups, classes, and in public screenings in several states. At the initial screening in Milwaukee, to an SRO crowd on a wintry night, audience members commented that the stories in the film inspired them to “go out and do… because we have to have hope.” At the screening on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, one of the audience members said that the film reminded her of something her grandmother said: “You’re not coming behind me, you’re going ahead of me. You’re going to walk past me.”
This episode was planned as the pilot in a series that would focus on different regions of the United States and perhaps the world. The director, Janet Fitch of Milwaukee’s New Moon Productions, died in December 2023, as she was beginning work on the next episode. This film thus serves as the final product of her decades-long career as a feminist filmmaker.
Director Statement
I made this film because my initial experience with the readers’ theatre play, Most Dangerous Women written by Jan Maher and Nikki Nojima Lewis, was life changing for me, and for other audience members I spoke with. Later, interviewing college student and mature actors at another performance took it to another level, as I witnessed the power of embodying the characters, singing the songs and speaking the actual words of women working together for peace across generations for more than a century. Actors and audience members always asked the same questions: “Why don’t I know about these women? Why weren’t their stories taught to me or shared?” I began work initially on a film version of the play, asking women to talk about the “dangerous women” in their own lives and to reflect on the words of historical figures. This evolved into a more focused look at women’s activism in the U.S. West, the region of the world where women first gained formal political rights.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Janet Fitch
Director Janet Fitch was a documentary filmmaker in Milwaukee. Her first co-producer role in documentary was: Through One City’s Eyes: Race Relations in America’s Heartland (PBS 1999). The film’s award-winning community engagement campaign was also the topic of Fitch’s Masters Thesis in Journalism. At a time when engagement with documentary film was an emerging field, Fitch was awed by the possibilities of community engagement and impact. She applied lenses of race, class, gender, geography, and generations to take us away from the world of polarizing frameworks, offering a fresh glimpse of expanded critical thinking and sensible solutions to societal problems. As director of the award-winning, 3-part documentary series, Guns, Grief and Grace in America, Fitch depolarized discussion of gun violence by redirecting focus to a frame of Public Health prevention. Recognition of her work at the intersection of the arts and social change includes a wide range of accolades and awards, including the Milwaukee Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award in Public Policy. Fitch’s films have aired on National PBS and Public Television and screened at multiple film festivals, winning awards in both film and engagement categories. Fitch’s early love affair with engagement and impact continues to flourish as her films live long productive lives, serving as tools for deliberative dialogue around the issues of our times. www.ChangeGunViolence.com
Prof. Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW-Milwaukee, where she taught for 35 years and served twice as director of Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author or editor of 40 books that have appeared in 10 languages, including a number on women’s history. These are widely used in teaching, from middle school through graduate school. She was involved in the original conceptualization of Most Dangerous Women as a documentary that built on a reader’s theatre play with the same title, which was produced twice at UWM. She was present at most of the interviews and filming for this first pilot episode, Women of the West, and was active in the post-production process. She prepared the toolkit with discussion questions and links to further resources for classroom and community use, and since Janet Fitch’s death, has shown the film to community groups and led discussions. She has decades of experience in presenting women’s stories to diverse audiences and encouraging their engagement with the issues these stories raise.
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